skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been doing Drupal full time for the past four years and I'll agree 100%. People that try to build applications in Drupal are running a fool's errand. It's got a ton of code and another ton of assumptions, but that's the thing; when those assumptions are what you need and that's code you don't have to write, magic happens.

I'd say, 90% of the time, if you're using Drupal and you're in a code editor instead of the admin UI, you're making a mistake, either because there's an easier way to do what you're doing, or because you shouldn't be using Drupal. The real trick is knowing which.
It already has. Their work on getting L4D working on Linux has already made it so that it now runs faster on the same hardware than with Windows. Source: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
GameMaker: Studio comes to Steam
This isn't an official release, it's a preview...
Twitter’s Odd Lockout Feature
I'm in the middle of the machine learning coursera course, and registered for this one as well due to interest in the material.

My one complaint is that the programming assignments weren't interesting at all. The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes. For someone who understands the basics of linear algebra and programming, it was just a syntax challenge, and that got irritating after a bit so I stopped doing them.

I won't get the certificate for completing the course, but I have a few extra hours of free time each week to add this second course, so I'm happy. I doubt that the actual homework that Stanford students taking this course get is so easy and repetitive, though, and I'm positive they wouldn't complain about not getting to retake quizzes after getting poor grades.

Not to knock the course. I've learned a lot and the professor (Andrew Ng) does a good job.
Wielding Katana 3.0 Beta – The DerbyCon Edition
If Nokia-built phones with Windows were unable to compete in the market then can Microsoft-built phones fare any better?

Seems unlikely
33 Percent Of Google Users Will Use Bing More After ‘Bing It On’ Challenge
you cant start mid-way though ... right ?
That teardown is crazy. I was definitely surprised. Not the most professional tear-down but very funny how they keep repeating each other and then seem genuinely surprised.

I don't know about "best tear down ever" though...
I'm the guy that initiated the Stream team and is leading it. Here are a few clarifications:

- Technically the streamteam isn't a part of Copenhagen Suborbitals, but rather a part of the support organization Copenhagen Suborbitals Support. The streaming initiative was set in motion to capture more viewers and members of the support organization.

- The primary reason we created this software wasn't that the videomixing needed to be done at sea - it's a bit more complicated than that. Launches are done in the Baltic Sea, 30-40 km. east of the Danish island Bornholm. In order to stream live we managed to get a wi-fi connection going from Bornholm to the mission control ship 40 kilometers away, but we couldn't reliably get enough bandwidth to stream all our camera positions to Bornholm. Furthermore internet connection on Bornholm is not very good. The result being that we needed to do the videomixing at sea. Only problem was that the broadcast studio, and thus the people that need to do the vdeomixing, were placed in Copenhagen. The result being this videomixer where we can send two streams from the launch site at sea: the livefeed and a mosaiq of available camera positions. The studio in Copenhagen can then remotely mix the livefeed based on the mosaiq using a webbased interface, or a commandline.

Here's a blogpost Peter (the author of snowmix) wrote about it: http://raketvenner.dk/?p=689

We have more great stuff in the works for next years launches including autonomus vessels with cameras, video overlays with live telemetry data from the rocket, and probably more great geeky stuff!

If you want to join us send me an e-mail, it's in my profile. Nobody gets paid but it's damn fun! And rockets!
I pay for:

* Spotify * Netflix * Dropbox * Linode

Sometimes I'll add a service for a month or two, but I usually find myself coming back to the basics. I'm not sure what it is about them, but I really dislike monthly charges.
The calculator necklace thing is what I was referring to.

But I'm speaking from personal experience.
Most interesting for me was that green patch on Iran. Didn’t expect it to be that big. It's a mysterious country.
No no no. What the hell is anyone going to do on charmin.com??? Download a guide on how to wipe your ass? How often will you go there? Once? Never? Exactly. Facebook on the other hand... It's fresh and new. When people go there, they like it and then they're essentially subscribed. As many others have said, they have 300k likes. That means whenever they push something it shows up front and center on the first thing people do when: they wake up, when they're poopin, when they're in line for coffee... Etc... It's push not fetch.
AES-NI perhaps: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tech...
There is an interesting practical question here. Why cheat?

If you are taking a class voluntarily over the Internet, what benefit would be gained by cheating? I presume that a large fraction of people who are doing volunteer coursework are doing it to learn, not to keep a GPA up for some other reason (sports eligibility, scholarship requirements, parental expectations, Etc.) so looking at other solutions on Github might actually enhance the experience for you if you look at other solutions. If you find a way to do it better than the other solutions that could be a goal in itself.

This is one of those things I find most intriguing about 'free' classes on the Internet, the value equation is shifted around.
Hackers ‘Team GhostShell’ Leak 120,000 Records From 100 Major Universities
Most Americans don't care about their electric bill for more than a few minutes every month (when they open it to pay it). Even egregious whoopsies like leaving the fridge open or the windows open don't usually add up to a large financial penalty.

A whole-house current draw might be a useful number to make available, but without incentivizing or gamifying it beyond trying to turn a $100/mo. bill into a $75/mo. bill, getting traction is going to be especially challenging.

The "kill-a-watt" meter is kinda neat for figuring usage out- is that the same functionality you were considering?
(Ignoring all the safety stuff in other replies)

These are tunnels over 3km long. You can't have cops down there without breathing apparatus - even if the extractors were safely operating.
I tried to do a couple coursera courses and found the video lectures highly inefficient; very needlessly time consuming, even watching them sped up. All I really want is a glorified text book with quiz grading and a final.
It depends on the purpose of your education. In an ideal world, it would be just to learn, but I think employers at some level look at grades/school as a qualification process.
That article is a waste of time. It rails against poor arguments and a lack of insight with... poor arguments and a lack of insight. For umpteen pages. For some reason we're supposed to hear out people who start an argument with "I'm not racist but..."

If you find yourself saying "I'm not racist but..." you shouldn't be trying to justify yourself and come up with reasons why the other person should hear you out. You should immediately stop and think about what you're saying, because chances are that you are a bigot, and all the argument in the world isn't going to change that.

The existence of those sorts of bingo cards is because these arguments come up over and over again. It's a useful tool to help deal with bigots.
I wonder if they are using the GPS to track customers.
They have fume extractor fans in the tunnels. If they aren't on, CO poisoning for everyone.
How Many Tablets Are In The USA? And Does It Matter?
Looks like only the cover art was leaked, not the games.
Apple hit by patent suit over Passbook
Not sure I agree with you, copyright laws were created with a profit motive - to protect author's work from being stolen or inappropriately used.

Without copyrights, what incentive does an author have to produce new work? Someone will take it and redistribute it, take credit for it, or otherwise profit from it.
Facebook delivers a confident sales pitch to advertisers
I took the Bing challenge and I did feel that the Bing results were better, but because they felt like Google's results from maybe 3 years ago. Anyone who uses Google often can tell what Google search results look like, and those identifying features were exactly what turned me off -- Gplus results, the image galleries, other "features", etc.
America’s new subprime boom: This time it’s cars
X1 carbon still designed in Japan, along with a couple of other models. http://blog.lenovo.com/design/developers-on-the-x1-carbon-in...
Did Apple's fanboy fever peak with Steve Jobs?
> I do not think you have thought that through.

My remark was only in the context of the present conversation, where Pi is representable by the ratios of various integers.

I used a lot of slide rules during my years as a NASA engineer, but none of those I owned had marks for physical constants -- too bad, because it's a very good idea.
"... growing whisper within the security industry in Melbourne that there weak security might have been breached from China. ..." ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4605335

Any idea what type of systems they are running?
You'll have to wait until those lectures are made available, but you don't have to complete the previous work to see the lectures.
Apple or Google?
This is normal for low volume stocks during after hours trading.
As am I although there is pretty damning evidence in Sonoma County [1] California that you can cause earthquakes with it. That said, I'm surprised we've not seen more closed loop systems [2][3]. My favorite is to take a loop of tungsten tubing a reservoir, a cooling tower, and a turbo pump and toss the tubing into the magma flow of a volcano. Pull out enough heat to run a turbine but not much that you freeze the lava. I'm totally going for this concept in my Mad Scientist Power Base.

[1] http://www.geysers.com/

[2] http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/powerplants.html

[3] http://www.atlanticgeothermal.com/about/what-we-do.html
Oracle Outlines Java 2012 Strategy
The inherent limitation here is that Online Python Tutor is built upon a line-oriented single-step debugger (Python's bdb module), so there's no way for it to step inside of subexpressions (e.g., in your list comprehension example).
WordPress too. In fact in WordPress the site root URL is stored in two separate configuration fields, so woe betide you if you rewrite one field and not the other.

Thankfully the WP core devs seem to have been slowly cleaning stuff like this up over the last couple years. So even though this wart persists, I have hope it'll eventually get zapped.
I work on big Drupal sites and this simply is not true.

Drupal lets you get a ton of shit accomplished without making you understand a single line of code, have a reasonable Dev-Stage-Prod workflow, QA, even version control or backups, etc., but it's completely possible to do all of that. That means that it can scale from anywhere from something like a 16 year-old's shared-host fanfiction site to say Whitehouse.gov.

Of course that means that there will be tons of fuckups live-coding (or live-configuring) on production, or people that don't export and version things in environments when they should, and that people will construct fragile combinations of modules and configuration where a tiny bit of code would have sufficed, or write tons of fragile custom code with no tests or security review when there was already a module for that.

But allowing people to be fuckups doesn't force them to be, and they can be trained.
Facebook viral marketing: When and why do apps “jump the shark?” | andrewchen
It's a case of making it easier to get the customers permission to market to them in the future. More people will "like" your page on Facebook with a single click, than visit your website and fill in a form.
What Do Google and Goldman Sachs Have in Common? More Than You Think
All of the SHA-3 candidates were designed to be implementable in fast hardware. Here's a comparison of some of the hardware designs evaluated during the competition:

http://ehash.iaik.tugraz.at/wiki/SHA-3_Hardware_Implementati...

Keccak is one of the most amenable to hardware acceleration, but all of the finalists were good in both hardware and software.
One Year Anniversary of his Passing - Untold Stories About Steve Jobs
And that is why the concept of "derailing" is BS. The position of the speaker as member of an oppressed class means that you must accept their claims on faith. To question them in any way is "NOT ok". Adopting this policy means that no rational person should believe anything that comes from a group with such ground rules.
"... I'm having a really hard time seeing how this is any different than a traffic light being out. ..."

There are reports in the local press of these kinds of problems: "CityLink says it closed the tunnels because the IT problem affected incident detection and safety systems that are activated in the case of an accident. The network problem also affected the back-up system." ~ http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/melbourne-tun...

And references are being made about inability to communicate to remote devices via the network, "lost the ability to communicate" with its incident detection and safety systems." ~ http://www.itnews.com.au/News/317694,citylink-glitch-shuts-m...
You should use SHA2 for now, but be careful no matter what you use.
SSH Mastery, A Book Review
Microsoft's visa plan: More needed
I dunno, seems like a ton of work just to avoid doing a materialized view.
There are lots of great works produced today which simply would not be produced without copyright. For example, Pixar movies.

A world with Pixar movies is better than a world without them.
SEEKING WORK - Toronto/GTA or Remote

Have experience in a multitude of languages (PHP, Java, Perl, Flex, and C++ in order of experience)

Most professional experience is in the back end web development realm, have some experience with desktop and mobile application projects

MySQL, MSSQL and Postgres experience

Looking for long term projects if possible, anything in the Java sphere would be of definite interest.

Please contact me via the email in my profile if you could use my experience for your project.
Mozilla Persona to the login rescue?
I think the recommendation to use request tokens still stands[1].

I haven't really had the chance to dive into html5/client-side js apps yet -- but it should be possible to apply the same idea to single-page apps as well? Perhaps even easier, as you don't need a fall back to plain http/1.1 on the client side, as you can already assume the client is able to run javascript, and you could do a lot of stuff to manipululate/validate tokens there.

Having a good implementation (not having to roll your own) would be good, though. Judging by [2] you might have to implement it yourself. Although [3] and [4] looks promising for express.js at least.

I have not had time to review this -- so preform your own due diligence.

[1] https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-Site_Request_Forgery_(...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6617499/for-node-js-is-th...

[3] http://dailyjs.com/2012/09/13/express-3-csrf-tutorial/

[4] http://www.senchalabs.org/connect/csrf.html
Judging A Book By Its Lover
KVS Tool
Microsoft attacks JavaScript scaling with TypeScript
I see where you are coming from but were I interviewing you I would never even think to wonder about a self reported grade in a volunteer class. If the topic was important to the position I'd ask you to talk about it and tell me what you learned. I would hope I could spot you trying to feed me a line.

At the end of the day, as an employer, I am looking for 'learners' not 'cheaters.' If it turns out that an employee's personality/choices lean toward the cheating side I try to manage them out of the organization as smoothly as I can.
True story of what I did....

Went to college for 2 years while doing projects on the side (web apps in 98). Dropped out because I got two offers on monster.com working for internet companies and noticed that what they were offering ($52K) was more than the starting salary for my CS degree (they hired me for my experience).

After two years at that co I moved on, rolled over the 401K from there, about 10K and bought AAPL at 29 and AMZM at 40, then GOOG at 200 (if any of my kids want to go to college its paid for already, they are 10 and 9).

Moved on to work for a university (I still have no degree) and am there now making a good salary supporting my family and have lots of time off and get to work on new tech at job whenever I want with the projects I get (I keep my customers happy).

During the last two years I made 4 games for WP7 in the evenings, was first to market with them (free) and made a killing. http://CheeseZombieGames.com

My advice....FUCK THE CS DEGREE! Unless....you really really want to learn all that math and theory and other specialties (AI, OS's, Networking etc etc etc) because you are a geek at heart and constant learning is one of your passions (it is for me).

But you CANT do both, you will be horrible at both if you try. Pick one route, go with it, stick with it and do the best you can with it. Either will pay off immensely in the end, just be prolific (github sure, mobile, web etc anything).

Which will you choose?
> The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes.

Right; I agree. I'm not sure how they would go about making it more challenging though. They can't expect us to go out and collect data ourselves, after all. I suppose they could give us the data, then expect us to code the setup and algorithms up ourselves, but that, too, would become repetitive after a few assignments.

> Not to knock the course. I've learned a lot and the professor (Andrew Ng) does a good job.

Agreed once again. I knew nothing about machine learning before starting; now I know about neural networks, SVMs, and PCM. It's really cool how much I've learned already, for free, too!

I've also signed up for this course, but the quizzes really aren't up to par. As an example: the first quiz question was about training a neural network with too much data, and about whether or not said network would be able to generalize to new test cases. Overfitting neural networks wasn't even mentioned in the lectures; I had to rely on material from Andrew's class to answer the question correctly. This chasm between the lectures and the quizzes is likely because Geoffrey is the one creating the video lectures, but he's not the one creating the quiz questions; he is having TAs do it [1].

Nevertheless, it looks like they're responding to feedback, so hopefully it'll get better with time.

1. https://class.coursera.org/neuralnets-2012-001/wiki/view?pag...
Hi,

I am also taking the course by Andrew Ng and understand your complaint that the programming assignments aren't as interesting ( from your perspective). Being quite comfortable with linear algebra, I was able to complete the assignments easily.

But when I go through the course forums, I find that for many people taking the course, the intuition behind the use of linear algebra in ML doesn't come as easy as it does for us. I think when Andrew Ng designed this online course, he must have had those people in mind also. I think he mentions it at the start of the course that it's more about understanding the concepts and the implementation details should come later. The programming exercises are designed keeping that in mind, I think.

I tried to make the programming exercises interesting for myself, by first thoroughly understanding the code that they had provided and tweaking it here and there. Once you have done that, you could apply what you've learnt on real world datasets from sources like Kaggle and see how you fare :)
WarGames, however inaccurate, changed my view on computers when I saw it circa 1994 when I was 9 years old. The device I used to type up papers and find nudity transformed into something I could manipulate and customize without ever leaving the desk it sat upon.
The only course that is not significantly diluted is Koller's PGM. All others have been dumbed down to a degree where they provide no challenge to the courseree at all.
Given that Bruce Schneier wrote that he'd prefer not having an SHA-3 winner since the SHA-2 algorithms were not showing any weaknesses yet...
> My one complaint is that the programming assignments weren't interesting at all. The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes. For someone who understands the basics of linear algebra and programming, it was just a syntax challenge, and that got irritating after a bit so I stopped doing them.

I agree with this. The programming assignments I've done so far in the Machine Learning class are usually 5-7 matlab functions, many of which are about 2 lines of code (the longer ones might be ~10 lines of code). If you've ever done matlab/octave programming the assignments will take about 20-30 minutes and be completely unenlightening as you're literally just translating mathematical notation into matlab (which is, by design, already a lot like mathematical notation anyway). They provide entirely way too much skeleton code to learn anything from if you're not actively trying to learn. If I weren't already mostly familiar with most of the material presented in the class, I imagine I would never retain knowledge of how the machine learning "pipeline" worked or have any high-level understanding of the algorithms, because the assignments just require you to implement the mathematical pieces of each step, without ever asking you to, for example, actually call any optimization routines, or put the pipeline together.

The problem, I think, is that it would just be too difficult to do automatic grading in a way that is reasonably possible to pass if they don't turn most of the work into skeleton code. Since the automatic grading needs nearly exactly matching results, one minor implementation difference in a perfectly good implementation of the algorithm itself (e.g., picking a single parameter incorrectly, picking the optimization termination conditions incorrectly, choosing a different train/dev split, etc.) would make the entire solution completely wrong.
I took the challenge and google beat bing 4 to 1 for me.
Except I wasn't working for a contracting company. I was working for clinical research organizations and a multi-national pharmaceutical company.
Freshbooks http://freshbooks.com
Linode though I'm thinking of dropping it for...
Digital Ocean http://digitalocean.com which is VMs done right.
I also use Amazon AWS http://amazonaws.com especially s3.

I've been a flickr pro member for several years, although I keep thinking about moving it all elsewhere. But that's personal, not business use.
But I'm speaking from personal experience.

Yeah, you've really got to watch out for "progressive blacks" like me, we're trouble.
The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again
The Browser You Loved to Hate
Thanks Duck. Definitely a great post by patio11. I've seen a competitor with "more" features (looks like an actual company) charging around $50. I'm tempted to undercut that but reading the post has made me think otherwise. I am still a bit worried that I might not get any customers at all!